The story about how secure boot for Windows 8, part of UEFI, will hinder the use of non-signed binaries and operating systems, like Linux, has registered at Redmond as well. The company posted about it on the Building Windows 8 blog - but didn't take any of the worries away. In fact, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett, who originally broke this story, has some more information - worst of which is that Red Hat has received confirmation from hardware vendors that some of them will not allow you to disable secure boot.

I'm also wondering if it's possible to mathematically reverse a hash algorithm in a way that provides, say, all files within a size range between X and Y that result in a given hash Z when going through the hashing algorithm. This operation could be followed by analyzing those files in the hope of finding one which has some desirable properties (like, in the context of secure boot, some simple code which is able to load other code)

And if it is, whether such a "clever" approach would have the potential to beat brute force random data injection to a tampered binary until it gets the same hash, in terms of execution speed.